The banner over the glass doors reads like a promise the night can't keep. Gold script, soft floodlights, the kind of glossy program you don't fold because it would feel like a sin. People move in little currents—families with flowers, students clutching cases to their chests like life jackets, teachers practicing their neutral faces.
Hiroko checks her watch for the fifth time in one minute. "Twenty-five," she says, voice flat so it won't turn into something else. "We have twenty-five minutes."
Tsubaki's arms are crossed so hard it looks like she's holding her own ribs together. "The competition already started," she says, glancing at the entrance and then down the street and then back at the entrance as if the building will change its answer. "Why isn't Kao-chan here yet?"
Watari has his phone plastered to his ear, motioning apology as he paces. "C'mon, c'mon, pick up," he mutters, then switches to speaker and the hollow ring rattles out into the night. No voice on the other end. He cuts, redials, runs a hand through his hair and makes it worse.
I keep my hands in my pockets because if I take them out they might shake and I don't feel like sharing that with the air. I already know where she is. The knowledge sits in me like a stone I swallowed wrong: white hospital room, bandage slanting across her hairline, wrist tape from an IV she swears she doesn't need, insisting she's fine while the nurse lifts an eyebrow and tightens the monitor strap. The image is so exact it has weight. It drags at me every time my eyes go to the empty space by the curb, every time someone in a yellow dress rounds the corner and turns into not-her.
"She's late," Tsubaki says again, like the word late can be hammered into a useful shape if you hit it enough.
Watari thumbs the call button one more time. "She'll pick up," he says, trying on a grin he doesn't own. It slips. He looks at me for a second, like maybe I can make the phone behave. I give him nothing. If I say it out loud, the picture in my head will break the surface and drown this nice door and these nice lights and everyone standing under them.
Hiroko steps in so fast Watari takes a stutter step back. She plants her hands on his shoulders. "Keep calling," she tells him. Her eyes are bright in a way that could be anger and could be fear. "Over and over. Don't stop."
He straightens, seizes the order like a life raft. "Yes, onee-sama!!" he says, loud enough that someone turns. He doesn't even realize he said it until Tsubaki snorts and Hiroko's mouth twitches. It doesn't become a smile.
Hiroko turns to me. "You and I are going inside," she says. "If we can get them to push her to the end, we can make it work."
A cough of laughter tries to escape my throat and I swallow it down before it offends the sidewalk. "They won't," I say, and it sounds too calm, like someone reporting a weather forecast that already happened.
"Maybe," she says. "Maybe not. Gala programs are looser. Sponsors like stories." She hooks a thumb toward the doors. "Come on."
Tsubaki catches my sleeve with two fingers. "Text us," she says. There's too much inside the two words—worry, instruction, a plea not to make them invisible to whatever happens next.
Watari's call goes to voicemail again. He presses redial like the button owes him money.
The lobby is all quiet carpet and echo. Someone practiced the art of making sound feel expensive here. A student in a dress that hitches when she breathes stands near the desk, pinching the skin of her finger and letting it spring back, rehearsal for something else. A poster with neat headshots smiles at the exact center of the bulletin board. Kaori's picture is there, too, a girl caught mid-laugh. I don't look long.
Backstage is narrower, older. The paint on the baseboards is new, pretending the hallways aren't tired underneath. Performers drift in small clusters, pretending not to evaluate each other. Doors with small windows bloom and shut. From somewhere a warm-up scale snakes under a door and dies when someone remembers where they are.
Hiroko spots the man with the clipboard like a hawk spots a mouse. He is exactly the man his clipboard says he is—pressed pants, efficient smile, three pens clipped with a ceremony usually reserved for medals.
"Excuse me," she says, and the word has edges. "We're performer number fifteen. There's an issue. Our violinist is running late. We'd like to move our slot to the end of the program."
"I'm sorry," he says automatically, even before she finishes. You can tell the apology is an instrument he's had practice with. "We do try to accommodate delays, but the gala runs on a tight timeline—"
Hiroko leans in and sets the full weight of her professional smile on the table between them. "She's five minutes away," she lies, smooth as lacquer. "Traffic."
I feel the lie hit my chest and slide off. In my head Kaori presses the heel of her hand to the dressing on her temple and tells the nurse she needs five more minutes and the nurse says no, and the Five slips into a ditch and becomes Forty because the body doesn't know how to keep promises.
The clipboard man's smile struggles and then reasserts itself. "If she arrives during the slot, we can try to... but pushing to the end requires the other performers' consent, and we are... very full tonight. I hope you understand."
"She's the invited feature," Hiroko says. "It's a sponsor's recommendation. If we ask nicely, they'll forgive the shuffling."
A door down the hall opens on a tired hinge. The clipboard man brightens in relief. "Ah, Mikke-kun," he says, mispronouncing it in the cheerful way adults mispronounce names when they want to pretend familiarity. "Perfect timing."
The boy pauses in the doorway with the solemnity of someone who has spent a long time practicing his entrance. He's tidy in a starched way that looks painful, hair tamed with water, the half-grown height that promises he'll be taller next year and resents the current fact. Violin case slung over one shoulder. His eyes flick to me and then to Hiroko and, for a second, he looks exactly his age.
"Miike-kun is the final performer in the middle school division," the clipboard man says, turning a page and pretending the page is the world. "We were just discussing a small... adjustment."
Hiroko pivots, professional charm resetting itself like a mask. "Miike-kun," she says, warmth manufactured but not entirely false. "Would you be willing to switch? Our violinist got held up. If you'd play before us, we could give her a few minutes."
He blinks at her, then at me, and something slides across his face I recognize too well—calculation that learned to wear admiration's jacket. "Who is it?" he asks, voice steady but too high.
"Kaori Miyazono," Hiroko says.
Sigh.... Oh boy...
His eyes widen. He doesn't manage to hide the flash of recognition. It's not just the name. It's the videos. It's the way other kids talk about her in practice rooms and hallways—like a wildfire you're not sure you want to get close to and can't stop walking toward.
I think for one useless second that this is where kindness lives—that he'll grin and shrug and say "sure" because stories like accommodating someone else look good in the mirror. Then the other thing steps in, the thing that plays scales faster when someone leaves the room and imagines applause that belongs to somebody else, the thing that doesn't know how to make a difference between want and deserve.
"The last performer," he says, slow, tasting it, "the star of this concert... is going to be me."
The clipboard man's posture says excellent, a problem solved by someone else's vanity. Hiroko's smile holds the exact same shape for half a breath and then loses two degrees of temperature. "Right," she says, almost a whisper. "Of course. It was unreasonable to ask."
"We'll just have to cancel her performance," the clipboard man adds, and checks a box with the relief of a man who has moved one sticky item from one column to another.
"Yeah," I say. My mouth does it before the rest of me votes. The word lands like a pebble dropped down a well.
Miike shifts the case strap and finds courage in the clipboard's approval. "A-anyway," he says, and stumbles over the stutter like he meant it, "it's her fault for being late. On a day like this." His chin lifts because that felt good and the next thing will feel better. "She thinks she's special just because people like her. She thinks she can come late..." He glances at me, as if I will help him make the shape of the insult. I don't. He finds the rest himself. "What she... what she played wasn't music."
My breath lands where a laugh would if I were a different person. Hiroko's head snaps, and for a second she looks taller than she is. "You watch your mouth," she says, the politeness gone clean out of it. "You uppity little brat."
The clipboard man inhales, scandal blooming like a rash. The hallway shifts, tiny murmurs like the lift of bird wings. A violist down the corridor pretends to be invisible and fails.
I put my hand on Hiroko's shoulder before her temper takes us both into a place I'll regret later. Her muscle tight under my palm—anger stacked on worry stacked on the kind of love that knows what it's worth.
Miike holds my gaze because he thinks he has to and because he wants to know if it hurts. I step forward one small step and, before I can change my mind, I lift my hand and flick his forehead with one finger.
It isn't hard. It's the kind of flick you give a friend who won't stop talking in class. It makes a tiny sound. He jerks back like I broke something and claps a hand to the spot. "Ow!" His eyes shine in a stupid way that makes me realize, too late, that some part of me wanted to make him cry and some other part of me wants to apologize for everything that isn't mine.
Hiroko blinks at me like I grew a second head. I don't touch people. I don't touch children. I don't... do that. I step half a pace back and the ridiculousness of the act deflates me in the exact proportion I wanted it to inflate him.
"Music's beauty is in the eye of the beholder," I say, because I need a sentence to cover the fact that I just assaulted a minor with the lightest violence possible. "I think what she plays is the most beautiful thing ever."
It comes out too even. Too gentle for the shape of what's underneath. Images of Kaori choose this moment to stack themselves in a neat and awful column: Kaori on a stage pulling sound out of air like it was hiding just for her; Kaori on a rooftop with snow in her hair telling me not to go; Kaori in a hospital bed pressing her palm to gauze like it offends her and laughing and saying she's fine, she's fine, don't make that face.
Miike lowers his hand and scowls. He wants to say something better, sharper. He can't find it. The clipboard man opens his mouth to recite a policy about violence, then closes it because the policy isn't written to cover a flick and because Hiroko Seto is standing here and he knows her and his job requires liking her more than he likes being right.
I let out a breath that drains whatever performance I had left. "Oh well," I say, and shrug in a way that infuriates exactly the people who need infuriating. "Guess we came for nothing." I stretch my arms
Hiroko's face turns toward me, everything in it rearranging to make room for the sentence. "You won't play...?" Her voice is lower than I've heard it in years, softer in a way that has less to do with me than with the picture she carries around of a boy she's been trying to protect from himself.
"It's a duet ," I say. "Not point without her."
The last time, in the other version of this night, I sat under the lights and did it anyway. I played clean and cold and perfect while some kid—was his name this one? some other one?—sawed a line next to me like he could bully the piece into letting him belong. People clapped because that's what they came here to do, and I went home and lay awake and stared at a ceiling that didn't know my name. I will not do it again. I will not practice grief in public for the sake of a program that will be thrown away on the way out.
Hiroko opens her mouth. There are a dozen arguments waiting on her tongue—professionalism, reputation, responsibility. They all die there. She closes her mouth. She nods once, tiny, like her neck is under a weight. "Okay," she says.
I take out my phone. Watari has sent three more missed calls and one text overflowing with exclamation points that are pretending to be bravery. I write: **Cancelled. Going home. We'll see her tomorrow.** A dot appears, disappears. Then: **ok. we'll meet you outside.** A second later, Tsubaki: **...thanks for telling us.** And then: **she's gonna yell at us for visiting with no snacks.** I type: **bring the melon pan** and watch the dots chase their tails and vanish.
I pocket the phone. The clipboard man makes a sound that might be relief and might be indigestion. He checks another box because boxes are what he has.
"So... that's it?" Hiroko says. The corridor smells like dust and perfume. She looks at me like I am a decision she doesn't want to respect and has decided to anyway.
"That's it," I say.
We turn. The hallway extends in a politely lit line toward the lobby. A girl in a blue dress holds a bow like she forgot how for a second and then remembers. Two cellists argue about a part under their breath and pretend they aren't when the staffer walks by. A mother adjusts her son's tie and he makes a face that says he's too old for this and also please don't stop.
Behind us, I can feel Miike watching, the clipboard man trying to figure out if he should apologize and deciding against it, the shape of the program reshuffling itself so it won't show gaps when someone checks it later. In front of us, the door.
Outside, the night has leaned in closer to the building. Watari is on the steps with his phone held in both hands like he can warm it into working. Tsubaki is pretending not to scan every new person who appears, then failing and scanning them anyway. When they see us, their faces try to become the right shape in a hurry.
"Well?" Watari asks, because he can't help it.
"Cancelled," I say, and the word lands softer out here, like it knows the sky won't echo it back.
Tsubaki blows out a breath she didn't know she was holding. "We'll go see her tomorrow," she says, as if saying it makes it an appointment the universe is required to put on its calendar.
"Yeah," I say. The picture of the hospital room tugs again, hard enough to make me stumble inside my bones. I don't tell them I already know the color of the room, the sound the monitor makes when it remembers it's on, the way her smile will widen when we walk in to make space for our worry and hide the part that's tired. I don't tell them any of it. I keep my hands in my pockets and my face on the simple setting.
Both Watari and Tsubaki shoot each other a fleeting look of disappointment. Their frowns leaving as quickly as they came.
Hiroko looks up at the banner with the gold script and then past it, to where the night starts being honest again. "Let's go," she says.
We leave the building the way shadows leave a room when someone opens a door: quietly, all at once, not looking back, the noise we brought with us falling to the floor behind us and staying there.
—
The lab always smells like somebody cleaned it five minutes ago and then apologized for not cleaning it better. White walls. Humming machines. The faint, polite beep of a centrifuge that hates being ignored. Under the hood, a thin halo of airflow bends the corners of a sticky note that says DO NOT BREATHE ON SCIENCE in Saitou's handwriting.
He's already there when I come in, sleeves rolled, hair a stubborn gray that refuses symmetry. He doesn't look up right away; he finishes labeling a rack with the slow care of a man who has learned the expensive way what happens when you trust memory. Then he sets the Sharpie down and eyes me over his glasses.
"You look like a spring someone wound and then forgot," he says.
"You don't even know the half of it," I say, taking my place at the bench. Gloves. Notes. The ordinary ritual that tries to convince your head to show up.
He grunts. "And?"
"Almost played in a music competition."
The pipette in his hand pauses mid-air. "...You play music."
"Yup," I say. "Piano."
We let that live where it lands. He doesn't give me the I never would have guessed speech or the Play something for us sometime grin people offer when they're trying to fold art into small talk. He just nods once like it explains some line in my face he couldn't name before and passes me the rack.
We work. It's a quiet kind of choreography—the click of tips, the soft aspirate, the tiny, satisfied push. Two bodies sharing the same map without stepping on each other. Beyond the glass, the city does its uninteresting noon. In here, the world shrinks to the width of a tube.
"Skyclars," he says, shifting topics the way you step around a puddle. "The last batch held up through the stress test."
"At thirty-seven?" I ask.
"And forty," he says. "Didn't like forty-two. That's okay. Nobody likes forty-two." He flips his notebook to the right page, the margins a battlefield of arrows and crossed-out numbers. "Stability looks... good. Better than I thought we'd get this week."
"Near a finished product," I say, and the words show their teeth when I say them out loud.
He nods, not triumphant, just accepting. "Near. Then—trials." He ticks them off with the pipette like a metronome. "Animals first. Then humans. Paperwork, ethics review, more paperwork, a committee that thinks we should reinvent patience, some statisticians who hate joy. If this line holds"—he taps the graph—"we'll be looking at access in... two months for anyone who's allowed to be first."
Two months. The number lands in my chest and rings, not loud, but deep. In the building where Kaori is lying awake and pretending not to be, two months is a room with the windows taped shut. I set the rack down before my hand can tell on me.
He watches my face like he's reading a gauge. "It's the fastest I can say without lying," he adds. "I could say one. It would be a pretty sentence. It would be wrong."
"I know," I say. I do. Science isn't a piano you can force with will and caffeine and shame. It has its own time, its own nerves. You rush it and it punishes the people you tried to save.
Saitou leans his hip against the bench, folds his arms. "You're not sleeping."
I pretend to check a label. "I'm sleeping. Just... not efficiently."
"Uh-huh." He doesn't bother rolling his eyes. "Your uncle said you were stubborn. He left out self-immolating."
"My uncle likes me better when I'm a project," I say, and it makes him snort despite himself.
He goes back to the notebook, then stops. "I need you here in one piece," he says, matter-of-fact. "Not for me. For the work. For her." He doesn't say the name because we both know it. "Don't break yourself trying to carry time on your back. It won't help you lift."
"I'll sleep," I say. It sounds like a promise because I want it to.
We fall into the hum again. He scribbles; I pipette. The laminar hood sings its white noise. In the rack, a row of vials stands at attention like a parade of small, stubborn chances.
When the run ends, we label and seal and tuck the future into cold metal. He closes the door with the small gentleness he saves for machines that have been kind. "If the animal data looks like I think it will," he says, "I'll start pushing the committee on compassionate access for your...friend."
"Thank you." I echo
He lifts a shoulder. "I can't promise a miracle. I can promise annoying emails."
"That's almost better," I say.
He eyes me. "Eat something today."
"Define 'something.'"
"Food," he says. "Not envy or guilt. You kids are addicted to those."
I pull off my gloves. They snap like a period. "I'll bring melon pan to the hospital," I say. "She'll yell if we show up empty-handed."
"That sounds like a person I would have liked," he says, and goes back to his graphs before the sentence can make either of us sentimental.
I step out into a hallway that smells like coffee and floor polish and stand there for a second with the cold of the minus-eighty still on my skin. Two months, he said. If everything behaves. If luck decides we deserve it. If—
Just hold on, I think, and the thought has the shape of a prayer I don't believe in. Just hold on.
—
The last bell of the day has a lazy sound in summer, like even the building knows it's on borrowed time. Doors slap open. Shoes squeak. Someone yells that they're free and someone else yells that they're not, because exam retakes haunt those who underestimate algebra.
I cut through the wave and end up by the bike rack under the plane trees that shed a new layer of pollen every time you breathe wrong. The air tastes like sun and chalk. Across the yard a chorus of kendo shouts from the gym starts up, all spirit, no rhythm.
Watari appears at speed, shirt untucked like it's a philosophy, phone in his hand like it fused there. "Arima," he says, skidding to a stop. "You look like you wrestled a bear and lost."
"I wrestled a spreadsheet," I say. "It was a draw."
He peeks into my bag. "Snacks?"
"Working on it."
Tsubaki arrives walking, not running, which is how you know she's worried. Bat bag on her shoulder. Hair up with a tie that doesn't match her uniform because she never cares about that and never will. She looks at me like I'm a test result she wants to argue with. "You okay?"
"Define 'okay,'" I say, and immediately regret borrowing Saitou's material.
She snorts despite herself. "Bring something she likes," she says, pragmatic. "Onigiri, melon pan, those weird jelly cups she pretends not to like and then eats all of."
"Copy," Watari says, already typing into his Notes app like we're planning a heist. "Also, flowers? Or is that too—" He gestures vaguely. "Room-mom-ish."
"Don't bring lilies," Tsubaki says. "Rooms shouldn't smell like funerals."
He pales. "Right. Right. No lilies. Sunflowers? Those are happy. They look like they're shouting."
"She'll throw them at you," I say, and it feels good to say something ordinary, something with the shape of a joke, even if the laugh comes out thin.
We get the snacks because not getting them would be a sin with witnesses. The lady at the bakery recognizes me and piles more than I ask for into a bag with a smile that says she knows exactly where we're going and what bags like this are for. She tucks in an extra canelé like it's a prescription. "For courage," she says, and winks at Tsubaki as if the courage might have to be shared.
Watari buys three bottles of tea and then stares at them like they might explode. "Do hospitals let you drink tea?" he asks.
"They let you be a person," Tsubaki says. "Usually."
We don't talk much on the way. The sidewalks are their usual argument of bikes and feet. The sun hangs lower, turning every piece of glass into something that wants to blind you. I walk the bike instead of riding it because moving too fast feels disrespectful, and because when I sit on a seat and put my feet on pedals, my body tries to be nineteen steps ahead of my head.
At the corner by the station, Watari points without looking like he practiced it. "We'll go up the back street," he says. "Less traffic. Fewer people."
He's right. The shortcut smells like detergent and air conditioning and the faint, clean iron of laundry hanging to dry. Someone's radio plays a pop song that doesn't know how to be sad even when it tries. A cat yawns at us from a low wall like it's exhausted by our drama.
Tsubaki falls in step beside me until our shoulders almost bump. She doesn't look over. "You tell your mom where you're going?" she asks Watari, because it's easier to use his name to ask me the question.
"Texted," he says, and then laughs. "She sent five hearts and a thumbs-up and then asked if we had enough bus money. We are not taking a bus, Mom."
"Text them when we get there," Tsubaki says. It's to him and also to me and also to herself. She is a person who makes lists when the world starts to tilt.
"Okay," he says.
The hospital shows up all at once like buildings do when you've been thinking about them too hard—the kind of modern box that wants to look like it isn't tired by being glass. Automatic doors. A kaleidoscope of polite signs. People moving in the particular way people move in places where everybody is either waiting or pretending not to be.
We stop a minute on the sidewalk because rushing the last five steps feels like daring fate to trip you. Watari looks at the bag as if a melon pan can hold a shield up. Tsubaki shoves a hand into her skirt pocket like she's about to hit a ball out of the park just to prove she can.
"You ready?" she asks. It's soft. It's a hand on the small of the back.
"Yeah," I say. My voice behaves.
Inside, the air has that thin-clean cold that makes you aware of your skin as a border. The elevator gives us a reflection we don't need—three kids trying to look older, trying to look smaller, trying to look like they belong in a place where everything is labeled and nothing is certain.
On the way up, a nurse steps in with a stack of charts and a smile tired enough to be true. A kid with a stuffed dinosaur comes in after her and stands on his father's shoes. The doors open. We spill out with the rest.
We turn down a corridor I already know. Left, then right. There's a machine at the intersection that beeps in a rhythm that could be music if you didn't know better. The floor is too clean to squeak. The letters on the wall are too clean to lie.
Tsubaki takes a breath like she's about to say something brave and then decides we can be brave without naming it. Watari shifts the bag to his left hand because his right is shaking and this is the way to lie that works best.
I lift my hand toward the doorframe with the nameplate I've been trying not to picture all day. Stop it halfway. Let it fall.
"Okay," I say. It is not a plan. It is the smallest sentence big enough for the moment.
We step in.